AI visibility
What is generative engine optimisation?
Generative engine optimisation is making your pages easy for an AI assistant to read, trust and cite. It shares foundations with SEO but rewards different things: parseable HTML, unambiguous entity signals, and specific quotable claims rather than keyword coverage.
The short version
A generative assistant composing an answer does three things: retrieves candidate sources, extracts claims from them, and cites the ones it can state confidently. GEO is making your pages survive all three steps.
What it actually requires
Text a machine can read
If your content is assembled in the browser, a crawler that does not execute JavaScript sees an empty page. This is the single most common disqualifier, and it is invisible in a browser — the page looks fine to you.
Test it the blunt way: fetch your page with curl and read what comes back. If
your content is not in there, no amount of writing will fix your citation rate.
Claims that can be lifted
Models quote specific, self-contained statements. A vague “we are experienced” is not quotable. A restaurant’s “the kitchen serves until 23:00 on Fridays” is. The difference is whether the sentence survives being removed from its paragraph.
An entity a model can resolve
Assistants build a picture of who you are from consistent signals: one business name spelled one way, structured data stating what you do and where, and links to profiles that corroborate it. Three inconsistent variants of your name split the evidence three ways.
What does not work
Keyword density does nothing. Neither does writing longer — length dilutes the quotable passage rather than strengthening it. And blocking AI crawlers to protect your content guarantees you are never mentioned, which is a strange trade for a business that wants to be found.
Article FAQs
Still have questions?The short answers.
Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
No, though they overlap. SEO competes for a position in a ranked list. GEO competes to be the source a model cites when it composes an answer. Ranking helps but does not decide it — we regularly see sites outranked in search that are cited more often, because their pages are easier to parse and quote.
How do I know if AI assistants are citing my site?
Ask them. Query the assistants your customers use for the questions your business answers, and record who gets named. It is manual and it is the only reliable signal available today, because none of the major assistants report referral attribution the way a search engine reports impressions.
